SiS’s Motherboard Chipset

Silicon Integrated Systems, better known as SiS, has introduced its latest chipset, the SiS 735 for AMD Socket A processors, including the Duron and the Athlon. Motherboards based on SiS chipsets have been popular among the budget-conscious due to their low price, but haven’t really offered great performance. With the 735, however, things are looking different, as we found out with our performance benchmarks. Although motherboards based on this new chipset are not yet available in the market, we got a test board directly from SiS on which we ran the tests.

About the chipset

A great feature of this chipset is that instead of having a South Bridge and North Bridge, it integrates both in a single chipset. This should give motherboard designers and manufacturers more flexibility in designing and manufacturing boards based on this chipset. The next important thing about the 735 is its support for both DDR and normal SDRAM. This gives motherboard manufacturers the choice of providing support for either type of RAM, depending on availability, price, and demand of DDR in different parts of the world. The chipset supports up to three DIMM slots with a maximum of 512 MB per DIMM, giving it a combined capacity to house 1.5 GB RAM. This is more than sufficient for most applications and the most avid of gamers. Add to this the 4x AGP slot, which can take in the latest graphics cards in the market and you have the makings of a mean machine. 

The 735 has two IDE channels, which support ATA100, 66, or 33 drives. The audio department is also taken care of with an integrated AC97 audio codec, which means you don’t have to spend extra on a sound card. With broadband starting to spread to the home segment, the integrated 10/100 Ethernet will save you the cost of buying a network card needed for cable Internet. It can alternatively have a 1/10M HomePNA (Phoneline Networking Alliance) controller, which can be used for home networking or sharing an Internet connection with other computers in your home. The chipset also supports up to six PCI slots and six USB ports, which are used to add devices and peripherals to your PC. Plenty of these means you won’t have to worry about expansion. Finally, the SiS 735 is also compliant with AMR, ACR, and CNR slots. These slots are used to house next-generation sound cards, modems, etc, and some AMR devices have already started to show up in the Indian market. So, as far as features are concerned, the SiS 735 is jam-packed. What you get finally, of course, depends upon what motherboard manu- facturers will integrate.

The performance department

This brings us to the all-important performance department. We pitched the board against a Gigabyte GA-7DX motherboard, which is based on the AMD 760 chipset, a high-end chipset supporting DDR memory. The remaining configuration that we used was an AMD Athlon 1.33 GHz processor (which is incidentally the fastest Athlon available in the market till now), a LeadTek GeForce2 Ultra display card with 64 MB VRAM, 256 MB DDR RAM, and a 7,200 rpm IBM hard drive. 

Our first test was Business Winstone 2001, which runs various commonly used productivity applications such as Office 2000, Netscape Navigator and Norton AntiVirus, and comes out with an overall score that reflects how well these applications were able to run on the system. Here the SiS 735 got a score of 53.2 compared to 50.3 for the AMD 760, a difference of 5.5 percent. Next we ran Content Creation Winstone 2001, which in theory is similar to Business Winstone 2001, but runs high-end applications such as Dreamweaver, Director 8, and PhotoShop, instead of productivity applications. The SiS 735 again managed to outshine the AMD 760, with a score of 58.7 compared to 54.2. We then focused our attention to gaming, and ran Quake III Arena on both boards. Here, it was a close fight between the two, with the 735 giving slightly better frame rates at higher resolutions. 

In 3DWinbench 2000, which tests the overall 3D capabilities of the system and gives a score in frames per second, the SiS 735 managed to get 160 fps, a feather above the 157 fps of the AMD 760. A similar trend was seen in Video2000 where the SiS 735 with a score of 2,340 beat the 2,159 of the AMD 760 with a 7.7 percent difference. From these numbers, it is evident that this chipset means business when it comes to performance. 

The final word

It sure looks like Athlon and Duron fans have something to look forward to with this chipset. Now all that remains is the price, which will be governed by SiS and motherboard manufacturers. Going by the trend, it won’t be too much of a surprise to see a very competitive price for SiS 735-based boards. SiS has also introduced the SiS 635 chipset, which has pretty much the same features as the SiS 735, but supports Intel Celeron, PIII and Tualatin processors. If the performance and features offered by this chipset are anything to go by, things look bright for the SiS 635 too. 

Sachin Makhija at PCQ Labs